Trend Micro on Monday plans to roll out a new version of its Deep Security software to help organizations protect servers, whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based, from modern malware threats.

"The market for malware writers has changed," said Harish Agastya, director of server security for Trend Micro. "It's now profit motivated. It's about writing malware that's sophisticated and stealthy, so it can live on your machines without declaring its existence."

Trend Micro receives about 1,500 unique malware samples per hour today, up from about 600 per hour in 2004.

The environment for servers has also changed. Most data centers today employ server virtualization technology, but virtual machines tend to be less secure than physical hardware.

In addition, the adoption of outsourced cloud-infrastructure typically means that corporate data lives in a multi-tenant environment. "Multi-tenancy is the key change as you go from internal data center deployments to the cloud," said Agastya.

Security risks in such an environment can get complicated quickly if everyone involved isn't making the right security decisions.

Deep Security 7 is among the first security offerings to take advantage of the VMsafe API, which allows third-party applications to interact with functions made available through the hypervisor, the virtualization management software.

By coordinating protection with the hypervisor, separate security for each virtual machine instance is no longer necessary, said Agastya.

Some of the new features in version 7 include event tagging, to better manage security incidents, the ability to create a reference state for reducing false positive alerts, integrity monitoring, and log inspection.

Deep Security 7 ships in November under two different pricing models: For physical servers, it costs $885 per server. A virtual server license for VMware environments starts at $2100 per socket, with unlimited agents per host machine.

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